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How to Streamline Employee Scheduling

If a business is going to be successful, labor management services are an important factor. Balancing employee scheduling requires that you have enough people to get the job done, but not so many that you’re cutting into your profit margin.

How can you determine the best way to schedule employees for optimal productivity and profit? Here are a few tips to help you streamline the scheduling process.

Request Employee Availability

You can certainly hire employees for specific shifts, but you might also want to allow for some measure of flexibility in scheduling to account for different lifestyles. Whether employees are students, parents, or night owls, many will have different preferences when it comes to scheduling.

If you’re willing and able to accommodate different work schedules within your operation, you can keep employee morale high and probably improve performance by offering preferred work hours as much as possible. You should also try to ensure that one or two employees aren’t enjoying the best schedules at the expense of others (even if they have seniority).

Fairness is important when it comes to scheduling, and the right human resource software could help you to input preferences and availability in order to ensure fair scheduling practices.

In addition, you need to set up a system that allows employees to request time off. Whether you’re complying with FMLA guidelines for employers requesting medical leave or your workers are seeking vacation time, you need a time-off request system in place to ensure that you have adequate coverage while still allowing your staff to schedule needed breaks.

Consider Cost vs. Customer Service

Proper scheduling for your business should include concessions for employees when possible, but the more important goal is to ensure that you have staff on hand to conduct business. This can be a difficult balance to strike.

Whether you’re in the service industry, manufacturing, or another type of business, you have to consider both the cost of having employees on the clock and the amount of work to be done. This is easier to calculate in the office setting, especially if your company follows standard business hours.

If you run a restaurant or retail store, on the other hand, you want enough employees to handle the number of anticipated customers, but you don’t want so many employees that there’s not enough work (and income) to justify having them on the clock.

Track and Analyze Trends

In this day and age, it’s silly to forego the HR analytics software that allows you to track business trends, including how busy you are at certain times of the day, the week, the month, or the year. The right human resources software can help you immensely when it comes to streamlining employee scheduling so that you always have the right number of employees to handle anticipated workflow.